12th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium
(WTIS-14)
Tbilisi, Georgia, 24-26 November 2014
Document C/4-E
24 November 2014
Presentation
English
SOURCE:
Telefonica Research
TITLE:
Big Data for Social Good
Big Data for
Social Good
Nuria Oliver, PhD
Scientific Director
User, Data and Media Intelligence
Telefonica Research
6.8 billion subscriptions
96% of world’s population (ITU)
Mobile penetration of 120% to 89% of population (ITU
More time spent on our phones than watching TV or
with our partner (US and UK)
Emerging and developed regions
Cell Phones as Sensors of Human Activity
Digital footprints enable large-scale
analysis of human behavior
May 19, 2011, 7:06 pm The Sensors Are Coming!
By NICK BILTON
Telecom / Wireless
NEWS
Cellphones for Science
Scientists want to put sensors into everyone's hands
Can mobile digital
footprints be
used to
understand
aspects of
human behavior
that could help
improve the
world?
Pandemics
0%
80% 55%
Impact on disease propagation
Impact on disease propagation
10%
40h
Big Data for Social Good
Crime Prediction
Analysis of impact of floods
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/17/nuria-oliver
Relevant Publications
"An Agent-Based Model Of Epidemic Spread Using Human Mobility and
Social Network Information", Vanessa Frias-Martinez et al, 3rd International
Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom '11, Boston, USA, 2011.
"Flooding through the Lens of Mobile Phone Activity"
Pastor-Escuredo, D., Torres Fernandez, Y., Bauer, J.M., Wadhwa, A., CastroCorrea, C., Romanoff, L., Lee, J.G., Rutherford, A., Frias-Martinez, V., Oliver,
N., Frias-Martinez, E. and Luengo-Oroz, M.
To appear in Proceedins of IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology
Conference, GHTC 2014, Silicon Valley, CA, Oct 2014
“Once Upon a Crime: Towards Crime Prediction from Demographics and
Mobile Data” - A. Bogomolov, B. Lepri, J. Staiano, N. Oliver, F. Pianesi, A.
Pentland 16th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
(ICMI 2014)
Talk at WIRED 2013. London UK
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/17/nuria-oliver
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/08/using-big-data-to-fight-pandemics/
Challenges
Regulatory
1. Lack of updated regulation
2. Lack of clear guidelines regarding safe data handling,
processing and sharing for humanitarian purposes
Technical
1.Representativeness of the data, generalization
2. Combination of data from multiple sources
3. Real-time analysis and prediction
4. Lack of ground truth  intervention to validate
Privacy
1. Potential privacy risks need to be minimized and
understood
2. Clear code of conduct and ethical principles
Opportunities
Aggregated and Anonymized Mobile
Phone Data allows us to quantitatively
• Model and understand large-scale human
behavior (e.g. levels of activity, mobility
patterns)
• Measure behavioral changes
• Predict/Classify external information
• Enhance the tools currently used by policy
makers and provide critical information in
areas like urban planning, crisis management
or global health
What can we all do to
responsibly turn this
opportunity into a
reality ?
Thanks!
nuria.oliver@telefonica.com
@nuriaoliver